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Thursday, May 31, 2012

I spent a lot of time at my grandparents' house as a child. We lived with them for nearly a year when I was four.

At some point, my grandmother told me the story of Anne Frank, minus the part where they all get caught and sent to concentration camps.

I became deeply fascinated by Anne Frank, and Meemaw invented a game in which I was Anne Frank and she was some other, less glamorous member of the family. We'd sneak upstairs and try to be as still and quiet as possible.

Inevitably, Meemaw's role in the game would require that she go downstairs to fend off some Nazis or stage a rendezvous with the German neighbor who smuggled us our groceries.

Meanwhile, I stuck to my post in the secret annex, thinking how nice Meemaw was to play the lesser role that involved going downstairs to the boring part of the house.

Eventually, Meemaw would return from the perilous outside world with a snack she'd scavenged.

The Nazis always lost the war just in time for Rugrats, or dinner, or both.

When I think of the Anne Frank game now, I am in awe of my grandmother's ingenious ploy to keep me out of trouble for hours at a time and simultaneously teach me about World War II.

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

I didn't blog at all during April. I'm sorry. I thought I could do Script Frenzy and work two jobs and blog for a month, but I was wrong. So very, very wrong.

For the record, Script Frenzy is a writing challenge, the goal being to write 100 pages in the month of April.

But if it's any consolation, I won Script Frenzy, and now I fully intend to start blogging regularly again!

I've discovered that when I tell someone I've won Script Frenzy, but they don't actually know what Script Frenzy is, they think I've won $1,000,000 or something, and then I feel bad for getting their hopes up.

People also tend to assume I wrote a movie. Hubs did write a movie for Script Frenzy (which is awesome, and I'm not just saying that because he's my husband--it has a cat assassin, you guys), but I wrote a script for a graphic novel, which is really a lot like this blog, except instead of incorporating the illustrations, you make a detailed note where you want each one to be. As a result, I now have hundreds of illustrations to go back and draw, which I plan to do very, very gradually.

Frankly, knowing that something that was just a vague idea floating around in my head for the past several months is now an actual rough draft, I really do feel like I won something. My ideas have been made solid. I could even print them out if I wanted! But I won't because that would be a lot of paper and ink.

If you're wondering what I wrote about, imagine more stories like Meemaw and the Rocks, interlaced with other random stories from my childhood. I already have a few picked out that seem like they'd be able to stand alone as blog posts, so as I illustrate them, you'll be seeing them here! Yay!

It's good to be back. I really missed talking to you, big anonymous Internet vacuum!